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Video & Computer Game Urban Myths

The famous Atari 'landfill incident' is PROVED true! Atari dumped zillions of un-sellable 'ET' game cartridges (and others too) into a landfill site in the early '80s. Although excepted as fact no one has found the site.

Until now...

Link
 
barfing_pumpkin said:
I heard that in Metal Gear Solid, Snake can creep into a ventilation duct and watch a woman exercising but if you do something special first, he watches her undressing. Perv.
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Hmmm. Don't know about the ventilation duct, but I know for a fact (cos I did it) that if you follow Meryl very fast when she's still in combat fatigues and going to the ladies (can't remember which level it was, because it's been ages since I played it - I guess 'the level where Meryl goes to the ladies' will suffice, considering the linearity of the game) you get a chance to see her in her undies.

I can assure you that lady values functionality over design.

*EDIT* I've just remembered - it happens just before you have to fight Psycho Mantis *EDIT OVER*
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The ventilation duct bit is early in the game when you are trying to get to the DARPA chief's cell. As you crawl through the ducts you can get above another cell where Meryl is locked up and exercising. If you leave the ducts and go back in she is doing a different exercise. Do it again and she's doing another one. The next three times you do it she's doing the same three exercises but in her underwear.
 
gncxx said:
Wasn't it Robin of Sherlock which reset itself if you swore at it? Or was it Bored of the Rings? Or The Boggit? One of those Delta 4 games. Whatever happened to those guys?
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Profanity Adventures is a website devoted to typing naughty words into ZX Spectrum text adventures and seeing what happens... ;)

river_styx said:
I remember Werewolves of London crashing every single time you managed to eat 6 out of 7 yuppies.

It might just have been a problem with my copy but the games were so cheap back then I never really cared enough to get my money back.
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I presume it's the ZX Spectrum version you had problems with, in which case the code was indeed corrupt, but it's been fixed now: -

Womble said:
Werewolves of London is an odd one[...]

I did try to find the bug but it was way above my head, I could follow the pointer in the code and after running the "make the munching" noise loop it flew of into the very low region of the ROM reseting the machine - I could never work out why.
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It's because the interrupt table is being overwritten due to the fact that a value is being loaded into the incorrect register pair.

This line :- #db85: ld de, #5a84

should read :- #db85: ld hl, #5a84

which makes the fix (to stop the crash after your final nosh up) Poke 56197,33.

Think the ending would have been best left to our imaginations, eh?

worldofspectrum.org/forums
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Profanity Adventures is a website devoted to typing naughty words into ZX Spectrum text adventures and seeing what happens... Wink
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what was the text adventure where you could supposedly get past a female android by typing 'rape android' to make her blow a fuse? seem to recall The Scum having a fuss about it at the time, and the company who made it blamed the players, and said that was a possible solution, but not the only one...
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Profanity Adventures is a website devoted to typing naughty words into ZX Spectrum text adventures and seeing what happens... Wink
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what was the text adventure where you could supposedly get past a female android by typing 'rape android' to make her blow a fuse? seem to recall The Scum having a fuss about it at the time, and the company who made it blamed the players, and said that was a possible solution, but not the only one...
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Artic Software's 'Ship Of Doom'.

Play it online (legally) here.


EDIT - I was one of the few (thousands) of 'speccy' users who got given a faulty power supply - and had to return 'it' for a replacement.

A whole month without my speccy! Arrrggghhhhh!

Anyway - got the 'proper' power supply and a free text adventure game!

Yes! You guessed it! Artic Sortware's 'Planet Of Death'!

Oh. You didn't guess it.

Never completed it.

Anyway. I got stuck in a lift that had a mirror in it. If you typed 'help' the clue it gave you was...

"VANITY WALTZ"

I tried 'dancing' in front of the mirror - but to no avail?

Anyone help me out?

Hurry! My feet are starting to blister.
 
You had to take the mirror I think. You needed it to get through some forcefield at which point I think you had to dance. Maybe. Long time ago that.
 
Good old internet solution pages. Remember the days when you had to pull your hair out for weeks on end hoping some magazine would print a hint or solution that would help you? And by the time they did you were fed up of the game and already on to your next 48k colour clash beeping wonder.
 
Remember the days when you had to pull your hair out for weeks on end hoping some magazine would print a hint or solution that would help you?
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i remember doing that with Avalon. drove me bloody crazy. i seem to remember finally working it out about a year later, then the next day i bought Crash magazine and it had the solution in :shock:
 
Probably shouldn't be part of this thread, but...

Jonathan Freedland puts the panic over video games into historical perspective by going back to the scandal surrounding the arrival of the early English novel.

Fears over the dangers of video games have been raised in Parliament and there is an ongoing debate as to whether they lead to irresponsible copycat behaviour and deprive the young of an active lifestyle. In the 1740’s similar concerns were raised when Samuel Richardson’s novel ‘Pamela’ took the public imagination by storm. For the first time readers were entering a hyper-realistic world - one where a servant girl being pursued by her master - and the line between reality and fiction became blurred; the novel’s arrival also coincided with the introduction of the sofa to the nation’s reading rooms giving birth to the first ‘couch potatoes’.

Jonathan retraces the footsteps of the ‘Pamela’ controversy via Richardson’s printers near Fleet Street; an image from the novel buried deep in the Tate stores and beside an elegant 17th century sofa in a London town house. Whilst exploring the shockwaves caused by ‘Pamela’ he also explores the controversy’s parallels with today’s debate about video games.
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BBC Radio 4 - LISTEN AGAIN (9th to the 15th Jan 2007)
 
RealPaZZa said:
in 1984 there was a game for the spectrum 48k called "kokotoni wilf" this may be an UL, or perhaps true? The manafacturers fan a compatition, all you had to do was write to the computer press praising the game, the best published letter in a magazine won something good.

review - http://www.crashonline.org.uk/09/kokoton.htm
cover - http://www.clive.nl/images/24069.jpg
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True.

If you completed 'Kokotoni Wilf' and sent a letter to the publisher, Elite Software, you got a letter back offering you the chance to meet Lee Majors (6 Million Dollar Man / Fall Guy) if you managed to be one of the 1st five people to get a letter published in a computer magazine praising the game. 'The Fall Guy' was to be a later release from Elite - hence the Majors connection.

It was never won.

Bottom of page under Damned By Fake Praise heading.
 
If you completed 'Kokotoni Wilf' and sent a letter to the publisher, Elite Software, you got a letter back offering you the chance to meet Lee Majors (6 Million Dollar Man / Fall Guy) if you managed to be one of the 1st five people to get a letter published in a computer magazine praising the game. 'The Fall Guy' was to be a later release from Elite - hence the Majors connection.
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lol i actually finished that game... never managed to get the letter published though... and it wasn't even that great a game, sort of a jet set willy ripoff with wings...
 
jetset.png


Jet Set Willy Online - multiplayer.

Has a 'Capture the flag' mode!

You'll need this Zip File to play.
 
I not only finished Kokotoni Wilf (still to this day, this game is the reason my dad's nickname is Wilf), but I also wrote up the game for the competition upon completion.

It wasn't published, and I never got to meet Lee Majors.

In fact, seeing as how you were supposed to also win a free copy of the 'as-yet-unreleased The Fall Guy game', I never watched another episode of of sheer spite.
 
I think it's excellent that folks here remember the early days of video gaming....simpler times...lot less colours...just as exciting.

At the moment I playing Starfox on my Nintendo DS, the game gets released any week now in the UK but I bought my copy online from Hong Kong - though it is an English version, I think. For posterity's sake and to put pay to any Computer Game Urban Myths that you may encounter in the years too come...you can say "Yes Starwolf did say that in the Nintendo DS versio of Starfox!"

cue 8 year olds asking mummy what a bugger is?

Starwolf.jpg
 
Does anyone else remember this or did i imagine it:
Back in the days of the commodre 64 Ocean software had the rights to Inspector Gadget, they sent out screenshots and stuff to various magazines that showed it to be one of the best games ever with incredible pictures and playability, however the actual game when released was completely different and looked like a cheap atari game.
I recall feeling really cheated at this.
 
There's a page devoted to the unreleased version of Inspector Gadget over at GTW64, where you can also download a preview of the game.
 
There has come to be an urban legend in World of Warcraft, I was noticing... It started when they were developing the game and they did (as an April fools joke) an article on a race called the pandaren, who were anthromorphic pandas. Later, one was added in the Warcraft III expansion, sealing them as part of the world. However, there is no mention of them in World of Warcraft, anywhere, except an item named for the individual from the expansion.

Now, whenever you want someone who takes the game too seriously's head to explode, you suggest that they add pandarens to World of Warcraft. At some point people began rebutting this with the urban legend (finally I get to it!) that pandarens can't be in World of Warcraft because the Chinese don't allow depictions of violence against pandas, or some such.
 
Here's one

At school (age 14/15 or so? so about 8 years ago) there was talk of a game - a fighter plane game - that had huge volumes of pornography on the install CD. Naturally, everyone then wanted a copy, BUT, you see, apparently, the game developers had got done and all porn-laden copies had been recalled and were thus unobtainable.

Does anyone else remember this? Is it true? Is it a UL?
 
At some point people began rebutting this with the urban legend (finally I get to it!) that pandarens can't be in World of Warcraft because the Chinese don't allow depictions of violence against pandas, or some such.
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Yeah, I've heard that one. The story is clearly nonsense because even if the Chinese had such a law, there's nothing stopping Blizzard releasing a different version of the game in China. Undead player characters, for example, have a different, less disturbing, model in China.

As a WoW addict I would love to see pandaren in the game, although my real dream is playable goblins...
 
Someday they will add the Smokeywood Pastures central hub to World of Warcraft! ;)

I should note that the Chinese do have some peculiar censorship laws: they didn't allow images of skeletons on stuff, so many Magic: the Gathering cards had to have their art changed. This may no longer be true, since a skeleton appeared on a Chinese card in the last set. China seems to be all about changing their image these days, after all.

Related to H_James legend, which I've unfortunately never heard of, there was a lady who did some modeling for Midway's games who they put a bunch of nude images of in Revolution X, but removed before it was released. She was the villain in that and the model for Sonya in Mortal Kombat, if I remember correctly.

This makes me wonder... In Smash TV, another Midway game, there is a place you can open up called the Pleasure Dome, which is full of bikini girls you collect for points. In the semi-sequel, Total Carnage, the Pleasure Dome is much harder to get into. Inside there are all these gift boxes like there were in Smash TV, that you collect for points. At the end it shows the guys from both games standing amidst bikini girls with the message that you missed some boxes and can't see the REAL ending. I got together with a friend and we worked hard to get every last gift box, and we still got that message. It occured to me much later that there are some gift boxes in the middle of regular levels elsewhere in the game. It would take a lot of work to get them all in one run, let me tell you. I still wonder what the real ending is...
 
Mister_Awesome said:
There has come to be an urban legend in World of Warcraft, I was noticing... It started when they were developing the game and they did (as an April fools joke) an article on a race called the pandaren, who were anthromorphic pandas...
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When was this April Fool's joke? A MMORPG I played a year or two ago had added an anthropomorphic panda class. Knowing the developers' odd sense of humor, I wouldn't be surprised if it had been inspired by this story!
 
Breezilla said:
Mister_Awesome said:
There has come to be an urban legend in World of Warcraft, I was noticing... It started when they were developing the game and they did (as an April fools joke) an article on a race called the pandaren, who were anthromorphic pandas...
Click to expand...

When was this April Fool's joke? A MMORPG I played a year or two ago had added an anthropomorphic panda class. Knowing the developers' odd sense of humor, I wouldn't be surprised if it had been inspired by this story!
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It was during development and before the Warcraft III expansion (I think), so quite a few years back... They kept teasing us with vague previews, and they dropped the pandaren on us one day! They have had an April Fools joke every year since, I think.
 
Now, whenever you want someone who takes the game too seriously's head to explode, you suggest that they add pandarens to World of Warcraft. At some point people began rebutting this with the urban legend (finally I get to it!) that pandarens can't be in World of Warcraft because the Chinese don't allow depictions of violence against pandas, or some such.
Click to expand...

Update - this may not be entirely false. There was an interview with one of the main WoW developers who stated that, although there is no law against fighting anthropomorphic pandas in China, the Chinese authorities had indicated to Blizzard (the games company) that they were uncomfortable with the proposed depiction of pandas in the game. Not least, I suspect, because some of the artwork shows the pandas as being quite Japanese-inspired.

So there you go. An urban legend which may have some basis in truth...
 
Video Gaming's Weirdest Ghost Stories

Source - IGN

Five urban legends of the spooky and the supernatural in computer games.
If ghosts can haunt anything from buildings to boats, crossroads to cars, why can't they also haunt our computers? While many everyday objects or famous locations have urban legends or hauntings associated with them, it's taken a little while for computers to catch on.

Here are five of the creepiest tales in computer gaming. While some are nothing but inventive nonsense, others are, in fact, entirely correct. You have been warned.


1: Minecraft's Herobrine - It seems that no amount of denial can dispel the rumours that Minecraft's single-player game isn't really a solo experience.

2: Polybius: The Haunted Arcade Cabinet - It was also said that Men in Black would shadow arcades where the game was being played...

3: Ben Drowned: The haunted Majora's Mask cartridge - His story goes on to describe how something was trying to talk to him not only through the game, but also perhaps through his computer.

4: Excel: The Hall of Tortured Souls - This Hall was a Doom-like minigame of gaping chasms and creepy chambers whose walls would fall away to reveal pixellated photographs of real people. The thing is, this rumour turned out to be entirely true. The Hall of Tortured Souls really did exist.

5: World of Warcraft: Goldshire Children and Karazhan dungeon - Without doubt, the strangest thing hidden amongst the many regions of World of Warcraft can be found in a house on the edge of Crystal Lake, in Goldshire. Here, at 7:00am server time, players claimed that you could watch six children run around in a pentagram formation, before dashing into their house.
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There's more on the link above. Never heard any of these before.

The MIB's hanging around arcades could have a source in the film "The Last Starfighter".

I played Majora's Mask and found it to be quite disturbing, late at night, alone.
 
I remember the Excel easter egg.
There was also one that was a flight sim.
 
It's surprising there wasn't more of these spooky stories going around back in the day, Polybius seems to have been more of an American thing and I can;t really think of any spooky stories connected to games of that era otherwise, just the usual b*llocks like the jetman trailer.
 
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